


When the Map Runs Out

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Turned Into a Ghost, F/F, Post-Mount Weather, Truth or Dare, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-21 13:31:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21075686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: In a cabin on the edge of a small Azgedan village, on the shortest day of the year, Clarke and Echo play a game of truth or dare.Third place winner for the best use of the 'character is laughing/crying too hard to speak' trope; first place winner for 'most unique pairing;' and third place overall winner in Round Two of Chopped: The 100 Fanfic Challenge 2.0





	When the Map Runs Out

**Author's Note:**

> Today's Chopped (2.0) tropes: a character is turned into a ghost; joke kiss turned real; an eavesdropper is discovered; a character is laughing or crying too hard to speak. This round's theme was 'canon spec.'
> 
> The title is from Brody Dalle's Underworld ("I've got a place in the underworld/That's where I'll go when the map runs out"), which does not fit the mood of this story but _does_ comes from a playlist of songs that remind me of Clarke during the S2-S3 hiatus so there's that.

Strange, unwelcome noises rise up from the darkness of the village at night, after the sun goes down. Susurrus sounds, like whispers, from the forest. Small, nervous sounds, like footsteps crunching through the snow. Perhaps these are only the wind, the creak of branches, or the movements of the animals that peer with bright, reflective eyes from between the trees. But everyone has heard—or told—a tale or two: of beasts that scratch and snarl at the door at night; of scarred  frikdreina, ancient and pale, only visible to those alone at dawn; of other uncanny fragments of the Earth, created or resurrected by the fires that remade the world. And the stories are never more urgent, nor more true, than in the gray hush of winter, when the village is covered by a thick blanket of snow and frosted over with ice, when the clear and frigid days are at their shortest.   


Clarke stands just outside the door, watching the last rays of sunlight disappear below the horizon, a fading flare of lavender and pink between the trees. A sharp wind blows her hair across her face and scatters loose flakes of snow over her shoes. Here at the edge of the village, she can see only two other houses, and otherwise nothing but the rise and fall of snowdrifts and a distant line of pines, deep green and dense, neatly arrayed like an advancing army in close formation. She has lost track of time since she left Camp  Jaha , but she's been told this is the closing of the year. The air is thin and cold, aching in her lungs when she breathes in deep. She has lost track of herself, too. She feels like she is standing at the far edge of the world.   


Behind her, inside the small, dark, one-room cabin, Echo is lighting candles. She's arranging them neatly on the table in the center of the room. She is piling up extra blankets and pillows on the floor, and pouring out glasses of something that tastes like sharp fire, to warm them from the inside, as the wind outside howls and blows and threatens to seep in around the door.    


Clarke scans the horizon one last time before she comes back in. She searches for uncertain movements among the white drifts. Like any hunted creature, she does not feel secure until she has examined her surroundings for herself.   


The door does not close easily behind her, only settles at last beneath the full force of her weight. She can still hear the wind. Echo is already sitting on the floor, on top of the blankets, legs crossed beneath her and her fingers gently curled around her glass. One thing Clarke likes about her: she doesn't ask a lot of questions, or judge Clarke for her odd habits or her silence. One thing she does not: that Echo is always watching her with unblinking eyes, searching eyes, that her silence seems to probe deeper than any questions could.   


"Almost dark out," Clarke says, crossing the room to her.   


"I know." Echo takes a drink, and then pushes Clarke's glass closer toward her.    


Clarke sits down, mirroring Echo's pose. She pulls her jacket tight around her, and this, at last, makes Echo smile, though the expression seems to crack, like ice in spring, across her face. She's native  Azgeda . Clarke has yet to see her bothered in the slightest by the cold.   


Like Clarke, she never wants to discuss her past, or anything else personal. She sidesteps Clarke's few questions, seems most at ease in the quiet, and when she does talk it is only to share practical information about the season, or to tell stories about the village, or to recount old tales of  Azgedan royalty. Only the last seems to stir up real emotion in her, a passion that reminds Clarke of some part of herself that she's long buried. A part of herself that she suffocated, inch by inch, on the long walk home after the Mountain fell.   


So she's surprised when Echo leans forward with her arms crossed on the tabletop and says, "We should play a game."   


The light flickers against the sharp rise of her cheekbones, creates shadows in the hollows of her cheeks.   


"What do you mean?" Clarke sticks her hands in her pockets and hunches her shoulders up. "What sort of game?"   


"A game of truth. We ask each other questions, and we're not allowed to lie." She shrugs, but the gesture itself reads as a falsehood. "We played it all the time when I was little. This is the longest night of the year. It will help to pass the time."   


Clarke lifts her glass and takes a long, slow sip. She could agree, and simply lie. She has never found lying difficult, and Echo, despite her steady gaze, her patience, would never know. She does not know that Clarke has been lying to her since they met, that dizzy night two weeks ago, at the  Azgeda outpost, beneath a crisp and star-filled sky that felt like home.   


Instead she says, "When I was a kid, we used to give each other dares. Everyone took turns. No backing down."   


Echo, sly and pointed now, as if she has never backed down in her life: "We could combine the two. Truth, or dare. No lying, no refusing."   


"No lying, no refusing."   


They raise their glasses, touch them together with a small, bright clink.   


"You choose first," Clarke says. "Truth or dare."   


"Truth."   


Clarke narrows her eyes. "Are you really  Azgeda ?" she asks. This question has been like a whisper at her shoulder now for days. Echo moves with ease across the snow and through the wind, but she doesn't have scars on her face or neck or hands. She seems ill at ease with the others in the village.   


"From birth," she answers easily, as if she thought the question were absurd. "Now you. Truth or dare?"   


She should say dare, but her curiosity and her confidence have risen too high. Her glass is already half empty. The warmth is spreading through her, an easy bravado with it. So she tilts up her chin and says, "Truth."   


"Were you kicked out of your village?"   


"No." She feels the disbelief in Echo's gaze, the slight widening of her eyes, though she is otherwise still. "No. I left on my own." She turns her glass around between her fingers. It is a matching set with Echo's, but unlike anything else in the little cabin: something stolen, perhaps, or something of a past life, something which no longer belongs. "I told you. They didn't feel like my people anymore."   


Echo raises one eyebrow. "There's a story there."   


"You've already asked your question. And I answered. I said more than I needed to say."   


"All right. Truth."   


"Who are you closest to in the village?"   


Echo opens her mouth to answer, a quick instinct, then sighs instead. The sound is barely audible, beneath the high, thin whistle of the wind outside. But Clarke sees the slight fall in her shoulders and the unsteady skip in her gaze.   


"Right now—you. I'm closest to you." She takes another drink, drains her glass and pours herself another. “Your turn.”   


Clarke has never seen her rattled even as much as this, and it makes her bold.   


"Truth."   


The candle flames sweep and flare, battered as if by a sudden wind. Echo straightens her back and squares her shoulders.   


"Were you ever in the Mountain?"   


"No. Were you?"   


"Yes."   


Snap of words too fast for thought between them, and Clarke's heart pounding painfully hard in her throat. She feels a rise of heat up her neck and across her cheeks, the candles too close to her, the light here at the center of the room too bright.    


When she does not speak, Echo fills the silence with low and steady words. "Yes, I was there. They held us in cages. Cages on top of cages in a dark room, deep in the Mountain. I see it in my dreams sometimes: the strange blue light and the sounds of rattling metal, captives with fight left in them shaking the bars and kicking the sides of the cages. The Mountain Men drained my blood from me three times. They made me weak." She takes another drink. “I’m sure you’ve heard the stories. Not all of them are true.”   


Clarke drinks, too, and fills her glass again.   


"The worst ones," Echo is saying, "are true."   


She must speak. She must distance herself from the Mountain. She was never there. Some other person with her face, her old name, was there and did a terrible thing. A terrible thing. And Echo is watching her and waiting. And behind Echo, the air starts to shimmer, and the pale outline of a figure coalesces out of darkness and shadow.    


Something hot and sick is rising up in Clarke's throat.   


Anya crosses her arms against her chest. "I told you," she says. "I told you not to trust this one."   


*   


Clarke rises, barely, to her feet, stumbles on shaking legs to the door of the cabin, and out into the snow, where she falls on her knees in the dark and wretches the contents of her stomach onto the ground. She coughs and sputters. Her hands feel like they have been cut by the sharpness of the snow, her palms already frozen and numb. Her hair hangs down to either side of her face. The air is so frigid that she can barely breathe, and her mouth tastes like acid and rot.   


Anya is sitting on top of a snowdrift, directly in front of her. She seems to glow against the deep black of the sky.   


Clarke sits up and wipes the spit from her mouth with the back of her sleeve. She pushes her hair roughly out of the way, spits again into the snow, and scowls.    


"How long were you there?" she asks, a low, accusatory hiss. "Were you listening that whole time?"   


"Yes."   


Do ghosts have no shame, Clarke has already asked herself many times, or does Anya have no shame? Was she like this when she was alive, or has death freed her from even the _pretension_ of tact?   


"I've told you before, Clarke—"   


"You told me that you do give me privacy sometimes. If you're going to be around, you should at least be visible."   


Anya shrugs. She looks bored, while Clarke is still kneeling in the snow, trying to calm the ragged, angry working of her lungs.   


"You should be glad that I look out for you," Anya says. "Your people killed me. I could just let you suffer on your own."   


This implies, Clarke thinks, that she has been doing anything besides suffering since she first made her way alone into the woods, which is a laugh. Or would be, if she were in the mood for laughter.   


"You scared the shit out of me," she says.   


"I scared something out of you."   


"Look, that conversation was none of your business—"   


"Why not?"    


A stupid question. But the answer is only a buzzing in her brain, a wall against her thoughts. She forces herself up and to her feet, because she needs to go back inside, because Echo is probably even now at the door, listening to her talking to herself, thinking she is mad—otherwise she would have already followed her outside.    


"What happened in the Mountain isn't a secret," Anya continues. "Not to me. I lived it, too. I know the truth, and that everything you've said to her is a lie, and that your lies will eventually fall apart. If I hadn't given you an excuse to leave so suddenly, who knows what you might have said?" She points one finger lazily at Clarke, an accusatory look across her translucent features, which reminds Clarke sharply of when she was still alive. "You're smarter than this, Sky Girl. You keep walking right into traps. If you don't turn yourself around, you'll soon find out how right I am."   


Clarke takes a deep breath. Letting it out feels like capitulation, even though the expression on her face is still hard and angry, pinched and narrow around her eyes and mouth. She pulls the sleeves of her coat roughly down over her hands. "Why are you still here, anyway?" she asks. The question sounds, even to her, like the dull accusation of a petulant child. "I thought your fight was over."   


Anya lifts her hands. They are clean and empty. The warpaint has long been washed from her face. "It is. I'm not fighting, Sky Girl."   


Clarke glares at her. "Not yet," she growls, and turns on her heel toward the door. "I'm going back in. Don't follow me."   


*   


Inside, she puts on a penitent face, apologetic and embarrassed as she sits down at the table again. She takes a long drink to clear the taste of bile from her mouth. Echo watches her, silent for a long moment, then asks, "Are you all right?"   


"Yes." She sets her glass down. "Yes, I'm okay. Must have been a bad reaction to something I ate."   


The excuse is poor and Echo does not look convinced, but she only quirks her eyebrow briefly up. Whatever was rioting within Clarke's gut, whatever that spike of fear at Anya's presence stirred up, whatever made her ill, it has settled now, and in its place two calm and simple realizations. What she wants, and what she needs. The distraction that will save her from this treacherous Mountain talk.   


"All right," Echo says slowly, and Clarke interrupts:   


"Ask me for a dare."   


Echo startles, slightly, true surprise across her face. "You still want to play."   


"Yes. Ask me for a dare."   


"Okay." She drains her glass once more and slams it down on the table, hard. "Dare."   


"I dare you to kiss me."   


On her palms, an unpleasant sweat, and in her ears, a dizzying rush of blood, the pound-pound-pound of her heartbeat, thumping too loud. Echo hesitates a long moment. Clarke wonders if she has misread the tension between them, wonders if it matters: the kiss is only a dare. A diversion. Make her uncomfortable, make her nervous. Anything.   


Then Echo stands up, sits down again on Clarke's side of the table, and puts her hands on Clarke's shoulders. She leans in, and presses her lips against Clarke's in the lightest, gentlest of kisses, the space of three, five, seven heartbeats. And draws back again.   


But she doesn't let go of Clarke's shoulders, and she is still so close that their noses touch, and Clarke can feel the soft exhale of Echo’s breath against her lips.   


Clarke wraps her hand in Echo's hair and pulls her in again. Crushed and close and breathless, this kiss is different, desperate, an aching deep inside her now laid bare and raw. Echo presses closer until they topple down, Clarke against the blankets and the hard wood of the floor, and Echo on top of her, straddling her. A heavy weight on her. A comforting weight.    


Clarke lets her hands explore, with undue patience, every soft curve and every hard expanse of muscle, creeping up beneath the layers of Echo's clothes, learning the intimate softness of her skin. She settles her palm against Echo's hip. Then up and across her back. Urges her closer, open mouth humming and moaning into her mouth, teeth clacking against teeth and the bite of teeth drawing on her lip. Their bodies rock against each other. She bends her leg up between Echo's legs. Echo's breath is hard and loud in her ear, and Clarke closes her eyes tight, as tight as she can, while Echo kisses and bites along the skin above her jaw. Everything fades. The wind, the cold. Clarke feels nothing but the cabin floor and the slip of the blankets underneath her, and Echo's weight and the warmth of her mouth, and Echo’s hand skimming down along her side, her leg, clenched fingers now grasping for purchase, desperate and true.   


*   


Clarke wakes with a start in the middle of the night, terrified, unable to breathe. Something has been pressing down upon her in the dark. Something has been clutching at her heart and her lungs. The horror has turned her body rigid; her joints and muscles ache; her throat is raw. Her heart pounds a painful rhythm against her ribs.   


She stares straight up into the darkness, afraid to turn her head, afraid to close her eyes.   


She is warm beneath a thick fur blanket, Echo's arm around her stomach, Echo's nose crushed against her shoulder. She can hear Echo's breathing, a steady rhythm in the dark.   


And she cannot breathe, she cannot breathe.   


Oh, the dead. The tables of bodies, slumped and dead and scarred with burns and boils. The awful raw meat of them. The disgusting marks on their skin. And so many. The fans were still running; the air smelled of the outdoors, of crisp late fall. Soon the bodies would rot and the air would small of rot. Except for the fans and their footsteps and the hitch of Bellamy's breath, and in the distance something that sounded from the first like awful sobs, there was only silence in the Mountain. But in her dreams she hears screaming echoing upon screaming.    


They all return. They are all ghosts. And they are coming from her.   


She still cannot breathe but now it is because she is crying. Ugly, awful sobs, wrenching sobbing. The noise of her weeping wakes Echo up with a small, confused trembling, and she lifts herself up, slow and tired and uncertain, and pushes her hair away from her face and rubs at her eyes. She blinks down at Clarke. And Clarke takes in a deep breath and lets it out in a wail, and turns on her side until she can hide her face in Echo's shoulder.   


Slowly, much too slowly, like a person still moving deep underwater in a dream, Echo wraps her arm around Clarke, pats her on the back, and whispers, "You're okay."   


She keeps crying. She cannot stop.   


"What's wrong?" Echo asks, a low, susurrus sound. The question sounds like ice, words carved out of the cold night air. "What's wrong? What did you dream?"   


Clarke shakes her head, still trying to catch her breath. "I—I—I'm s-sorry." She wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. The words are wet and broken sounds. She can barely form them. "I'm so-sorry. I n-never. I never do this."   


Echo's hand rubs circles into her back. "It's okay," she says. "I don’t cry either."   


A few rattling, uneven breaths. The tears have not stopped, but she can almost control them, almost believes she can before they start up again, a jolt like every single time she sees a ghost. Anya standing now, again, just behind Echo, next to the bed. Her face is impassive, silently watching them.   


"You've never felt like you belonged, have you?" Echo asks. For the first time, the even tone of her voice shades deeper, a pitch of sadness to it. She traces her fingertips along Clarke's arm, searching out invisible patterns there. "No tattoos."   


Clarke's breath hitches, and she swallows down a thick, wet lump of tears. She flicks her eyes up. Even in the darkness, she can see the shine of Echo's eyes, the distant and sorrowful, but knowing expression on her face. And despite the warmth of the blanket and the fire of their shared body heat, Clarke feels a sudden chill pricking along her skin.   


"You're different, aren't you?" Echo whispers. "If I asked you again about the Mountain, would you tell me the truth?"   


A chill, a cold horror along her skin.   


She cannot answer, and Echo does not give her time to try. She leans in instead, and kisses Clarke with a sweet, soft, pleasure: maybe an apology, maybe a disarming lie.   


"Let me get you a washcloth," she murmurs. "For your face."   


She slips out of bed, unheeding of the cold. Clarke follows her shadow in the darkness and the sound of her steady footsteps padding away across the room.   


Then she looks up and meets Anya's steady eye.   


"I told you," Anya says, calm and clear. The light glow of her skin and clothes suffuses her corner of the room with a chill and ghostly light. _I told you, I told you._ "She's Azgedan. An Azgdan spy."   


That roiling feeling is threatening again, a knot in her stomach, a sickness that wants to rise. She clenches her hand into a fist. _An Azgedan spy_, she thinks. _And now she knows about the Mountain. _ _ _

"Why didn't you tell me that before?"   


"Because I can only give warnings. I'm not allowed too much interference with events among the living." She glances across the room, just for a moment, and then back. Clarke does not take her gaze from Anya's face. She has never seen her look nervous before, not before her death, not since.    


"I can only tell you now, Wanheda,” Anya says, “because it is already too late."   


**Author's Note:**

> <strike>Voting for this round starts at 12am on Sunday, October 20, and runs through 11:59pm on Monday, October 21! </strike>
> 
> Thank you for reading! And thank you to everyone who voted in this round.
> 
> This fic has an accompanying moodboard [here](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/188530587535/when-the-map-runs-out-clarkeecho-35k-rated-t).


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